pable of
illustrating.[227] Within these limits, though occasionally passing
beyond them, and always with the same deference to the immoral tone
which seemed to have become an indispensable adjunct of the comic style,
even the greatest comic authors of this age moved. W. Wycherley was a
comic dramatist of real power, who drew his characters with vigour and
distinctness, and constructed his plots and chose his language with
natural ease. He lacks gaiety of spirit, and his wit is of a cynical
turn. But, while he ruthlessly uncloaks the vices of his age, his own
moral tone is affected by their influence in as marked a degree as that
of the most light-hearted of his contemporaries.[228] The most brilliant
of these was indisputably W. Congreve, who is not only one of the very
wittiest of English writers, but equally excels in the graceful ease of
his dialogue, and draws his characters and constructs his plots with the
same masterly skill. His chief fault as a dramatist is one of
excess--the brilliancy of the dialogue, whoever be the speaker,
overpowers the distinction between the "humours" of his personages.
Though he is less brutal in expression than "manly" Wycherley, and less
coarse than the lively Sir J. Vanbrugh, licentiousness in him as in them
corrupts the spirit of his comic art; but of his best though not most
successful play[229] it must be allowed that the issue of the main plot
is on the side of virtue. G. Farquhar, whose morality is on a par with
that of the other members of this group, is inferior to them in
brilliancy; but as pictures of manners in a wider sphere of life than
that which contemporary comedy usually chose to illustrate, two of his
plays deserve to be noticed, in which we already seem to be entering the
atmosphere of the 18th-century novel.[230] His influence upon Lessing is
a remarkable fact in the international history of dramatic literature.

Sentimental comedy.

The improvement which now begins to manifest itself in the moral tone
and spirit of English comedy is partly due to the reaction against the
reaction of the Restoration, partly to the punishment which the excesses
of the comic stage had brought upon it in the invective of Jeremy
Collier[231] (1698), of all the assaults the theatre in England has had
to undergo the best-founded, and that which produced the most
perceptible results. The comic poets, who had always been more or less
conscious of their sins, and had at all events not